Ethics and Significance: Insights from Welby for Meaningful Education

This entry focuses on Victoria Lady Welby’s (1837–1912) theory of meaning – which she denominated significs – and addresses her contribution to education as, specifically, the problematic of educating for values. To bring Welby’s legacy into edusemiotics is timely, especially considering that her work does not yet enjoy the notoriety it deserves. Yet her conceptualizations demonstrate the connection of her unorthodox theory of meaning to the philosophy of education today – a key concern in both edusemiotics (Stables and Semetsky 2015) and semioethics (Petrilli and Ponzio 2010), whence ethics is informed by signs, their interpretation, and translation in the context of practical life and human actions. Such new direction explored on the basis of Welby’s significs as a theory of meaning focuses on the relation between signs, sense, and values. A particularly important contribution from semioethics today is the special attention it devotes to the relationship between the study of language (philosophy of language) and ideologies as social planning. This interdisciplinary enterprise is especially important for education in the context of so-called global semiotics (Danesi et al. 2004). The study of semiotics, according to eminent semiotician Thomas Sebeok, went through the paradigm shift during the last century thus passing through the boundaries of its earlier, exclusively glottocentric, sphere to include the whole of life